is an imaginary flower that never fades.The amaranth is blue with black petals,it’s yellow with red petals,it’s enormous and grows into the shapeof a girl’s house,the seeds nestle high in the closetwhere she hid a boy.The boy and his bike fleethe girl’s parents from the tipof the leaves, green summer lightbehind the veins.The amaranth is an imaginary flowerin the shape of a girl’s housedispensing gin and tonicsfrom its thorns, a succulent.This makes the boy’s bike steeroff-course all summer, followingthe girl in her marvelous car,the drunken bike.

The spider living in the bike seat has finally spun its own spokes through the wheels. I have seen it crawl upside down, armored black and jigging back to the hollow frame,have felt the stickiness break as the tire pulls free the stitches of last night’s sewing. We’ve ridden this bike together for a week now, two legs in gyre by daylight, and at night, the eight converting gears into looms, handle bars into sails. This is how it is to be part of a cycle— to be always in motion, and to be always woven to something else.

Maybe, since you’re something like me,you, too, would’ve nearly driven into oncoming trafficfor gawking at the clutch between the two menon Broad Street, in front of the hospital,which would not stop, each man’s faceso deeply buried in the other’s neck—these mennot, my guess, to be fucked with—squeezing throughthat first, porous layer of the body into the heat beneath;maybe you, too, would’ve nearly driven over three pedestrians as your headswiveled to lock on their lock,their burly fingers squeezing the air from the angelson the backs of their denim jacketswhich reminds you the million and one secrets exchangedin nearly the last clasp between your fatherand his brother, during which the hospital’s chatter and rattlesomehow fell silent in deference to the untranslatablesong between them, and just as that clasp endured throughwhat felt like the gradual lengthening of shadows and the emergenceof once cocooned things, and continues to this day, so, too,did I float unaware of the 3000 lb machinein my hands drifting through a stop light while I gawkedat their ceaseless cleave going deeper,and deeper still, so that Broad Street from Fairmountto the Parkway reeked of the honey-scented windpushed from the hummingbirds now hovering above these two men,sweetening, somehow, the air until nectar,yes, nectar gathered at the corners of my mouth like sun-colored spittle,the steel vehicle now a lost memoryas I joined the fire-breasted birds in listeningto air exchanged between these two men, who are, themselves,listening, forever, to the muscled contours of the other’s neck, all of usstill, and listening, as if we had nothingto blow up, as if we had nothing to kill.

A bicycle spins.Along a breezy path in the field.Only the insides of the rubber wheels exhaust the earth.He will soon arrive in Baghdad.It is quite bustling there.Soldiers of the Red Army, curly-haired artists, pale-skinned Ryazan women, the spiral staircase of the cabaret.The piano makes tinny sounds.People standing on a mere footprint's worth of dirt are sharpened crystals. One wrong step leads to death. The infinite propagation of the sun.At the source of the disease the plants dry up, and the clouds tearing through the deteriorated city streets.Just as the past is nothing for him but an arrangement of trees, it is also cold like ash.The goose feathers at the entrance, the inverted shadow.